Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
The Memory of Salt, the debut novel from Melbourne author Alice Melike Ülgezer, is a raw and authentic story of love, loss and the tensions of reconciling a multicultural identity. Shifting between decades and traversing from Kabul to Istanbul to London to Melbourne, Ülgezer patchworks together the familiar and unfamiliar, creating a visceral and compelling story with heartbreaking undertones.
The story is told by Ali, the son of an Australian paediatrician and a Turkish musician. Having been raised in Melbourne predominantly by his mother, Ali wants to piece together his fragmentary understanding of his father, and in effect, to understand the Turkish half of himself (or possibly herself – interestingly, although I read Ali as a male character, Ülgezer has stated that the narrator’s gender is deliberately left undisclosed). His mother, Mac, so bruised by the past, tells him he’s crazy to want to delve into his heritage, but the questions are inescapable; they are always “shrouded in a thin membrane of the past.”
Ülgezer weaves together Ali’s journey with the story of his parents’ whirlwind love and eventual estrangement. Mac is travelling in Afghanistan when she meets Ahmet, a Turkish musician who has been performing as part of a circus. She is entranced by his vivacious energy and spontaneous nature, and they become swiftly, passionately entangled in each other’s lives, “savagely in love…wandering beachside villages, merging and blurring into each other.”
But Ahmet’s spirited and carefree energy, the very thing Mac loves about him, turns out to be masking a serious mental illness. Residual, acute paranoid schizophrenia is the official diagnosis, though he refuses to accept or acknowledge it, and it quickly drives a sharp wedge between them. One moment full of beans and exhilarated by life, Ahmet is prone to become suddenly, hysterically seized by a belief that Mac is a sorcerer trying to kill him, or that a passing tram is a Russian tank following him. In these moments he becomes violent and frantic, “blustering through visions, barbaric with grief. He would swing blindly with the fanaticism of fear, his voice scoring like fire. And afterwards even if he were strewn with wreckage he’d never remember a thing.”
Ahmet’s illness places Mac and Ali in the painful position of being both afraid of and afraid for someone they love. “I had to run Ali. He would have killed me,” Mac says. But these unsettling moments are balanced throughout the novel by bittersweet memories of love and intimacy, rendered in vivid detail through taste, sight and, particularly, music. Music is Ahmet’s passion, his obsession, the way he connects with the world and expresses himself, and it’s a language that the father and son share. The image of Ali and Ahmet playing together and getting lost in the music is one that holds the novel together.
Throughout the novel, shreds of Turkish pepper the dialogue, sometimes followed by a translation, sometimes not. By keeping the reader a bit outside the text, Ülgezer recreates for us Mac and Ali’s experience of their world; the dislocation of not always understanding everything that is communicated. Turkey is a part of them, but they can never completely be a part of it, and in the same way, Ahmet is a part of them, but they can never quite understand or get through to him. Ülgezer’s skill in recreating these complexities makes The Memory of Salt an impressive and memorable work of fiction.